This proposal co-authored with Thomas Holsteen.
In Confessions, Augustine presents two vignettes (3.2.2-4; 8.6.14-7.17) that, in important ways, parallel our interactions with social media. Both involve Augustine’s interaction and response to narratives, and both serve as smaller stories within the grand story of Confessions itself. Placing these two vignettes alongside one another sheds light on the nature of the larger work and on the power of social media in our lives.
Augustine warns in Confessions that the stories we hear, tell, repeat, and reify possess power to reshape the self. Brian Stock, Joseph Clair, and Paul Kolbet have all observed that Augustine both drew on and transformed earlier philosophical use of narratives and rhetoric in the formation of the self (Stock, The Integrated Self, 2017; Clair, On Education, Formation, Citizenship and the Lost Purpose of Learning, 2017; Kolbet, Augustine and the Cure of Souls, 2010). For Augustine, narrative never sits idle: like the weeping of Dido (1.13.20) or the pleasing falsehoods of the shows (3.2.4) it can alienate the self from its own despair and obscure the self from transparent knowledge coram Deo. Conversely, a story can pull the self out from “behind its back” and set it in its own view before God (8.7.16). This latter function of narrative is, of course, what Augustine sets forth as his purpose in writing Confessions: to re-narrate and untangle his whole life before the face of God.
For Augustine, the clamorous narratives pressed upon the self by a polyphony of ‘media-like’ sources must be replaced by a unitary narrative that brings the self to face reality and provides the context for true flourishing. Social media is nothing if not a powerful tool for advancing the types of narratives we tell about the world and about ourselves. Just as human beings haul around with them their own mortality and sin (Conf. 1.1.1), so now we bear with us, everywhere we go, the stories we tell about the world. We constantly receive them in microdoses of envy, or anger, or desire. The destructive influence of these narratives is evident from the growing numbers of studies connecting social media with negative mental health outcomes among young adults (Twenge, Generations, 2023; Kelly, Silanawala, Booker, and Sacker 2018). Though the means by which narratives are conveyed may have changed since the days of Aeneid recitation and the plays of Terence, the potential of false narratives to alienate the self from itself remains. An Augustinian solution to this problem of social media, then, must include not a rejection of narrative, but a substitution of narrative. Augustine offers a way forward through a therapeutic use of narrative that re-casts the human person in a narrative relation to God and neighbor, the constitutive feature of which is caritas (doctr. chr. 2.41.62).